From Arizona to Maine and beyond, a new generation of Indigenous entrepreneurs, activists and government leaders are making strides — and money — with clean energy. This article is part of a series — Power by the People: Clean Energy from the Grassroots. Read an excerpt below and more here: https://bit.ly/3rJs0v7 -- Solar development means economic opportunity. The Red Lake Indian Reservation, with a population of about 5,500, has an unemployment rate of 24 percent. Most of the available jobs are linked to tribal government, and most revenue is generated by Red Lake’s casinos. ​“We wanted to create jobs, entrepreneurship opportunities,” says Robert Blake, a tribal citizen of the Red Lake Nation of Ojibwe people. The ecological benefits of solar power are significant too for a tribe that has lived on the same 1,260 square miles of land since the 18th century. High levels of mercury from more than a century of coal power plant emissions have polluted the nearby Great Lakes and have been detected in the fish in the community’s namesake body of water, Red Lake, home to the country’s largest and oldest commercial walleye fishery. The tribe has fought the construction of fossil fuel pipelines across its land, which bring the risk of catastrophic explosions and oil spills as well as worsening climate change. Blake views the fossil-fuel energy system as part and parcel of an ​“extractive and predatory” economic system, one that threatens not just the communities and ecosystems directly harmed by it but the entire planet. Native people can now ​“take back these profits, take back these resources and start taking care of the planet and taking care of our communities,” he said.